Fashion Week on a budget
I went to the metaverse and all I got is this lousy Estee Lauder advanced night serum
I think my personal invitation to Paris Fashion Week last month was lost in the mail. As the lead (and only) writer of a fledgling queer tech newsletter independently published on Substack, I was pretty gutted. There must have been some kind of mix up, did they accidentally invite Joel Creasey? Why even self-publish an email newsletter without the recognition of the fashion elite? Hello, Anna Wintour, are you reading this?
But finally, late one night I received an email:
Paris, Milano, New York, London, and now, Decentraland — high fashion has gone virtual! Metaverse Fashion Week is here!
Okay, sorry this issue is so late! I’ve been busy doing non-queer computer related stuff … and some queer stuff too. But anyways …
The thing about fashion week, is that it’s not about the fashion shows — it’s about being seen in attendance at the fashion shows. So, before you even know the week of fashion has started, Evan Ross Katz has updated his insta-stories with a running feed of influencers and celebrities as they mill about on the sidelines in their matching pantsuits and Miu Miu bags. I quickly realised that if I was going to be attending the Metaverse Fashion Week, then I too, would need an outfit worthy enough of Mr. Ross Katz’ Instagram.
The rub is … the MVFW begins in five hours and I don’t own a single item of digital clothing!
I went to the metaverse and all I got is this lousy Estee Lauder advanced night serum
Building your avatar in Decentraland is kind of like building a sim in The Sims but a lot less fun. There’s an uninspired handful of clothing options to choose from, so I slapped on a rainbow flag tee-shirt and cargo pants, because if you can be anyone or anything in a virtual world … well they may as well just give you the most basic clothing possible so you purchase the good shit.
After a substantial loading time I was dropped into the metaverse. Considering the impending fashion show (now commencing within four hours), I assumed I would be welcomed by the hustle and bustle of a thriving digital city, where I’d walk through crowds of hundreds, if not thousands of strange and wonderful avatars. But after stumbling around the vistas of this metaverse of madness, featuring graphics just shy of 1996’s Quake, I found that this new world wasn’t the magical place I’d been promised — it was a digital wasteland.
One particularly harrowing experience was getting stuck inside a multi-level exhibition of digital art portraying religious icons taking selfies at famous tourist destinations. Jesus Christ! I felt closer to God than I was to finding a fashion week outfit. At this point I hadn’t seen a real person in over an hour, so I opened the Explore menu to discover where everyone was hiding. Turns out that the majority of online users — a little over 800 people — were gambling in virtual casinos, a grim look into the reality of the metaverse.
But the next most popular location — with about 10 users — was the Estee Lauder pop up. I entered the giant serum dropper in the sky and watched some tv advertisements for Estee Lauder’s advanced night repair serum. Besides that I didn’t really know what else to do and I wasn’t the only one:
Co#7b5d: I read that you are able to get some kind of glow in here as it is the estee lauder night serum!
Co#7b5d: But I can’t see anything!
Cheero#e2b8: I found it
Cheero#e2b8: You have to run into that light thing
Co#7b5d: Icant see any light thing haha
So I ran into that ‘light thing haha’ and I got some kind of glow thing. I found my first wearable — those yellow sparkles surrounding my avatar, my Estee Lauder advanced night serum glow.
Disclaimer: this newsletter is not sponsored by Estee Lauder, however, if you’re reading this from beyond the grave Mrs Lauder then I’ll be commencing a séance at the stroke of midnight to arrange a sponsorship deal, you would have loved the metaverse.
Fashion in the metaverse
But my Estee Lauder glow just isn’t enough to get on Evan Ross Kat’s Instagram. With only three hours to fashion week, I was running out of time to break the new internet, so I decided to hit up the fashion district.
Immediately one thing was made very clear: Dolce & Gabbana were funding this fashion week. I guess after DG was cancelled by diet prada for being racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and dressing the Trumps, the brand had nowhere else to go but the last (virtual) frontier. I visited their store to see what DG was considering the future of digital fashion and found a room full of cat mannequins in streetwear?
I couldn’t even wear any of the DG cat clothes on display, so I decided to stop pussyfooting around and head directly to the Decentraland marketplace. And lo and behold I found a DG tee going for 1,000 MANA. Oh, ‘what’s 1,000 MANA’, you say. It’s bloody $2,230 AUD, that’s what it is!!
At this point my head was spinning. I’d been invited to my first ever fashion week and I couldn’t even afford the digital clothing to attend. I thought the metaverse was meant to be all democratising and stuff. I aimlessly walked around for a while, feeling kind of sorry for myself, but then everything changed … I stumbled upon a kaiju-sized Spider-Man doing a sexy dance. I stood underneath him to get a better view and became mesmerised by the tight spandex sticking to his oversized inner-thigh muscles as he gyrated above me.
Finally, something I couldn’t just experience in real life by walking into the CBD. Was this the secret to the metaverse’s success? Because really, what is the point of the corporate office metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg has sold us:
I had a new-found respect for this iteration of the verse and was also curious about how horny this virtual world could get, so I attended the MVFW art exhibition curated by David Cash, with the expectation of a sexy exchange or some form of digital cruising.
It didn’t take too long for what I considered to be a proposition:
Darkathlon#4644: any fellaz around?
seriouslove#6604: hey
They didn’t respond and I wanted to take this exchange to its full potential, so I continued:
seriouslove#6604: I’m a fella
This didn’t really lead anywhere so all in all, it was a pretty disappointing interaction. To be honest, things got more kinky on Habbo Hotel 20 years ago.
Freebies and gas fees
Okay, the MVFW starts in 2 hours; I was done with being side-tracked and surely with fashion week coming up, there would at least be free digital clothes available. I went into every office building and store I could find and finally found a free wearable — a Binance branded hoodie (Binance isn’t finance for bi people by the way, it’s a nefarious crypto exchange). One day these branded hoodies will be the metaverse equivalent of the free company branded tote bag that we all have too many of. But it’s free and look, I don’t want to spend my Ether just yet, it’s doubled in a year, I’d be silly to waste it. (I put $100 into Ethereum last year when I was researching NFTs and that $100 is now $200.)
So, I go to mint my free wearable and I’m presented with a $20 gas fee! Turns out that when making any Ethereum transaction, users are required to pay gas fees that subsidise the ‘computational effort required to execute specific operations on the Ethereum network’. This is not to be confused with a carbon offset, as the fee simply pays for the computational work that is involved in mining Ethereum. Anyways, I refuse to spend $20 on a “free” digital Binance hoodie and reject the transaction.
A sword and a rose
It was becoming increasingly clear that if I wanted to be noticed at fashion week then I needed to spend some actual money — I decided to scour the Decentraland marketplace for the best clothing specials. As you can imagine by now, the marketplace is pretty shit: if the item is cheap, it’s trash; if it’s at all interesting, it’ll cost over $1,000 AUD.
It turns out that I could only piece together an outfit that I can also afford in real life — baggy blue jeans and a puffer jacket. But I had some spare ETH to splash out on a rose and a sword, just to differentiate my avatar from the real me. I think I spent about 50 bucks all up.
With my outfit sorted, just in the nick of time for the start of fashion week, I took myself out onto the red carpet and met all the other bros waiting for the hot digital fashion chicks to arrive.
The event was just about to start, and I was all ready to go … only, the thing is: I had been in the metaverse for five hours already; my eyes were hurting, I had a throbbing headache, and I also had dinner plans with my boyfriend that I was on the verge of running late to.
So, I bailed on the Metaverse Fashion Week altogether. If you’re still reading this Anna Wintour, thanks for the invite, but I’ll have to see you next year xx
